As always, we must consider the actual alternatives and not just our imaginary ideal scenario.
What is the alternative for the relatively large population looking to start families in a neighborhood with a good school district and child care on 1-2 working to middle class salaries while building some equity?
Can you point us to someplace where there is quality, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing new home construction happening at scale?
One consideration is that "new homes" have historically been something of a "luxury good" but somehow become so normalized in the last couple decades, that people argue "middle class salary" should be able to buy one.
Growing up, no one in my family lived in a new construction home, nor did any of my friends.
New construction needs to happen to increase aggregate supply to deal with incremental increases of demand. That supply though, may be more high end than median. Even this works fine because it means someone will buy a pricey new construction home rather than a cheap home and gut renovate it. The lack of new construction causes high income buyers to move further and further down market to buy-to-reno.
In many places (where building is still happening) the cost of new vs old construction is surprisingly close; so why not get a brand new 2023 house instead of that older 2003 one?
Because new construction is not necessarily built with the same materials and expertise as old construction. Good bones and all. Although I think you'd have to go back further than 2003 to get a meaningful difference in construction practices.
Early 90s is about how far back you have to go, around here, to get an appreciably better-built house. Solid wood trim and doors! Cabinets that don't fall apart when you so much as look at them! All in working-class houses of that age. I swear even the light switches feel like they're built better.
As long as it doesn't have a wood-single roof. Those haven't been good since some time in the '70s. Demand shot up in the '80s and they built a shitload of houses with fancy "50-year" wood roofs, but there wasn't enough lumber of the quality required to make them actually last 50 years (both increase in demand and an ever-declining quality of lumber in general caused this, I think) like older wooden roofs did, so they all started leaking after like 10-15 years. But at this point most of those have been replaced with regular ol' asphalt.
That may be the case, but you have to take survivorship bias into account, and the vast differences in available equipment and materials.
A modern double-paned house with R20 insulation and a well designed heat pump system is going to blow(er test) the doors off an immaculate mansion built in the 1900s with single pane glass and a gravity furnace.
Survivors are the only ones on the market so its already accounted for I guess. I think I misread your original comment, are you saying price for a well-built new home is similar to pre-owned good bones?
I was just noting that the prices are much closer now than they had been in the past (on a sq ft to sq ft even 10 years ago a 1970s house would be a good $50-100k less than a new house, though it was hard to compare because location, lot size, etc).
In my experience, "good bones" houses are harder to find than people realize, and there are lots of things that can wear out over time that you don't realize until you have one wear out.
For example, behold the glory of Orangeburg sewer lines, relatively common in some areas between the 40s and 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_pipe - a cool $10k+ when that finally eats it.
"The old ones are better" is sometimes true and in some cases; for example, an old plywood sided house will handle sustained water intrusion much better than a modern OSB sided house, but modern siding may prevent the water intrusion much better. There are also things that look really great but are actually disasters waiting to happen - river rock foundations, for example. A contractor friend once mentioned that the old victorians in our area were amazing except for the roof and foundation, both which can be annoyingly expensive to fix.
Based on my personal observations, assuming you avoid asbestos and aluminum wiring, the houses before the 80s are better than 80-2010s or so, especially 80-90s, as I've seen many, many cases of those houses built with newer materials that clearly the builders didn't understand or care how to correctly install.
That stuff can still happen on a modern house (hire a home inspector to inspect during build if you can) but they seem to have a better handle on how to do things right for the long-term.
but the baseline built in assumption that all home buyers should be able to afford new homes when people complain that new homes are too expensive is what misses the point.
New homes are built on the expensive side because that's what allows developers to turn a profit in areas where development plots are scarce to come by. That is - where land is the constraint, why would a developer choose to have a lower ROI?
Areas that new & old homes don't price too differently & there is still building happening are likely not in land/development/zoning constrained with undersupply.
Also laughing/crying internally as you describe 2003 as old (from my 1970s home)..
Never lived in a building that wasn't older than me..
Heh my last few houses have pre-nuclear steel in them, since they were built before the bombs dropped.
And yes, the "standard" (hard to call something a standard that only really existed for 50 or so years of the modern USA) of houses going out of style and passing down as starter homes, etc has been sadly disrupted.
And many of those starter homes are now held out as rentals, which further distorts it.
(We're actually in a "starter home" now and considering what the next step should be, and the vast improvements in energy, etc over the last 20 years alone is making me heavily lean toward building, especially as I can sit on the design and get something more reasonable for the cost.)
> One consideration is that "new homes" have historically been something of a "luxury good" but somehow become so normalized in the last couple decades, that people argue "middle class salary" should be able to buy one.
Yes, how dare the proles expect to live like the "best people".
McMansions are aesthetically pleasing to the average taste, which is out of alignment with coastal elite modernism. If your taste is out of the mainstream, then it is harder to find houses, and they will be more expensive. There are the occasional attempts at the non-standard suburban subdivision style. I liked these:
> which is out of alignment with coastal elite modernism
Most coastal areas I've been to typically value their historical architecture and maintain those aesthetics.
Really not sure where you're getting that from. If you go to areas in Michigan such as Troy, most of the houses are of a mid-century modern design similar to what you're sharing.
The design language of a McMansion inherently lacks cohesion. Its not an elitist take to say "taking various design elements from 6 different eras of building and inflating them all up to 150% scale" is a bad design.
If a design lacks any kind of symmetry, has windows that dont line up that are all different sizes, misplaced features, etc; its an ugly design. Not sure what else to say.
Midwesterners are not immune to good design practice, and its bizarre to suggest that people outside of the coasts are incapable of making a cohesive design.
> Most coastal areas I've been to typically value their historical architecture and maintain those aesthetics
Given that virtually all new construction in coastal cities is five over one crapboxes along with the occasional uninspired at best highrise, I don't see it. Certainly nobody is putting up what one might consider well built aesthetically pleasing mansions in downtown San Wherever.
5-over-1s are basically universal in the United States. You might see them more in coastal areas but that's because its where the population gravitates to.
I don't like 5-over-1s either but they're a product of zoning laws that tried to legislate out more compact housing.
I much rather have a couple duplex/quadplexes on each suburban block but a lot of folks really don't like that idea.
Bring up the idea of putting a cafe or convenience store inside a suburban culdesac hell and people will lose their mind.
> 5-over-1s are basically universal in the United States. You might see them more in coastal areas but that's because its where the population gravitates to.
Yes I'm aware. The point is that the coastal cities are not in fact trying to maintain their historic aesthetic. They're building the same crapboxes everywhere else is.
This isn't a dumb flyover hicks vs sophisticated coast tech bros issue. It's an observable fact that architecture and construction virtually everywhere in the USA and the West in general has been garbage for over half a century. McMansions are just a symptom of a deeper rot.
What is the alternative for the relatively large population looking to start families in a neighborhood with a good school district and child care on 1-2 working to middle class salaries while building some equity?
Can you point us to someplace where there is quality, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing new home construction happening at scale?